The Fighter (Saturday, December 18, 2010) (157)

It seems like these days every year has to have a boxing movie - or at least a movie about poor white people in Massachusetts. This year that film is The Fighter. It is basically just a boxing movie with almost nothing more interesting about it than that.

The story is about Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a white boxer in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has had a good, but less than totally impressive career. He's training for an upcoming fight that his mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who is also his manager, has set up for him. He has two trainers, a local cop and his brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who is a local hero because he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard once in a great fight. Now Dicky is a crack addict who never shows up on time to train his brother because he's either smoking crack or stoned from smoking recently.

At the opening of the film there is a crew from HBO Sports shooting a documentary on Dicky, about how he went from such a promising boxer to a crackhead wasteoid in just a few years. Dicky thinks the whole time that they are doing a profile piece on him as a champion, but they are really just focusing on his addiction.

Micky meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a bartender at the local watering hole, and they fall in love. She's very concerned that he's flushing his talent away working with the losers in his family. One night, Dicky gets in a fight and a chase with the cops and Micky comes out to help him. He gets his hand broken and has to rebuild his career, including taking better control of his training and management. This upsets the balance of his family, who all defend or ignore Dicky's addiction and puts Charlene at odds with his mother and sisters (he has, like, eight sisters... which is actually sorta funny... in a good way).

More than anything else, this film has gotten a tremendous amount of press for the acting - mostly the performances by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. I was honestly not totally impressed with either of them. They're both very showy roles that allow the actors to dive into a big pool and get wet. I think the best performance in the film is Amy Adams as Charlene. She's a very smart woman who knows what she wants and can generally get it. She has an wonderfulness about her (Adams is cute, after all), but a very endearing frankness as well (she has a tramp stamp tattoo, which suggests a less-than-angelic side). She's a sweetheart who will tell you to go fuck yourself is she needs to. She totally lights up the screen whenever she's on. It's a much more subtle performance than the others, and I think much better.

(I should say here that Bale's performance is very good, but it feels more like a very good impersonation of a guy who is rolling on crack. I never saw the depth in his characters as I did in Adams'. In the opening moment of the film, however, when he's being interviewed by HBO, he is really amazingly believable as a guy on drugs.)

The biggest problem with the film is the script, which is really badly organized, relies mostly on terrible boxing movie cliches (He's a boxer and he gets his hand broken! Oh no!), has lots of terrible dialogue (there's a scene with Dicky telling Micky, "I coulda been a contender!") and is mostly really boring sequences much too heavy on dialogue that doesn't move the story along. There is not that much boxing in this film (basically three bouts).

Director David O. Russell actually does a beautiful job technically with the boxing scenes (and with lots of the technical things here). Most of the boxing matches are seen through a TV signal - as if we were watching the fights on our couch in our living rooms. This is a very clever, original twist to the boxing movie. There is a lot that is made about Micky getting a fight on HBO (especially after the doc on Dicky hurts him so badly), that when we see him in his big match, we watch it as if it was on TV. Very clever.

One other really nice moment by Russell is in the bar when Micky first meets Charlene. There is a wonderful amount of background noise that surrounds them (it's almost reminiscent of Altman's sound use in McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and as they begin talking and she warms up to him (because he's goddamn charming), the noise recedes and you just hear the two of them talking. It's an elegant and nice effect.

As nice a job as Russell does with most of the film, this never really feels like a David O. Russell movie. I think of him as a master of black comedies. Even his most serious stuff (Spanking the Monkey and Three Kings) are very, very funny and are told with a wink throughout. This is much too serious and feels sorta like a director-for-hire piece rather than a Russell piece. He doesn't really do historical stories (Three Kings is a fictional fantasy piece set in a historical time and place).

Mostly this is just a particularly uninspired piece. It's not bad at all, it's just not much of anything. I feel here like I feel with a lot of movies, that I would rather just watch a documentary on Micky Ward rather than have to watch this. The film is as much about his brother (it is really about Dicky totally) and his crazy mother and family as it is about him. It doesn't really know what it wants to be, a boxing drama, a tale of drug use, a story of an effed up family. It's sorta none of those in the end.

Stars: 2 of 4

Night Catches Us (Saturday, December 11, 2010) (156)

Night Catches Us is a movie about a guy named Marcus (Anthony Mackie) who returns to his old neighborhood in Philadelphia in the late 1970s after he was forced out years earlier for working with the cops against a fellow Black Panther. When he gets back, he immediately begins flirting with his old flame Patricia (Kerry Washington) who is a lawyer still working in the community, helping former Panthers and other guys on the edge of society.

She has moved up in the world and now has a daugher, Iris, but she's still a radical. He's less of a political zealot and trying to get his act in gear and restart his life. As he's trying to do this, he is caught up in old power games with the new community boss, Do-Right (Jamie Hector, Marlo Stansfield from The Wire) as well as a new generation of kids who want to stand up to the Man like their parents did.

This has all the makings of a great movie: a great cast, an compelling story, a score by Philly natives The Roots, but it just never totally comes together very well. I think the main problem is the script and direction by newcomer Tanya Hamilton. The story moves along at a very slow pace with each scene like an interesting one-act play (it's very stagy), but the totality is so episodic that it's hard to follow the narrative. Each scene never totally connects to the one before it or the one after it very well. You get a general feeling for what is happening, but it never really gels very well. One of the main relationships, that of Marcus with Iris, sorta sits there looking at us, but not really moving much at all. All in all, the story is more complicated than is necessary, but then the mysteries are revealed in a very clumsy way.

There is a lovely 1970s look to the whole thing, with great costumes, production design, and cinematography - and if there's one thing that Questlove and the Roots crew do well its make a functional representation of a bygone sound. But aesthetics is basically all that this film has going for it. Hamilton uses very nice musical interludes with still photographs throughout as well, including one really wonderful montage set to Syl Johnson's Is it Because I'm Black... but sadly it doesn't really fit in with the flow of the film. (Also a shame is the Roots' song over the end credits, which is much too modern and references Rwanda in one verse.)

I guess this shows that Hamilton has an interesting voice, but one that still needs a good deal of work to polish. Perhaps she would do better with a script by another person.

Stars: 2 of 4

White Material (Wednesday, December 8, 2010) (155)

White Material is a very interesting, very difficult film by the great French filmmaker Claire Denis. In it, she examines white people in Africa, an idea she looked at once before in her first film, Chocolat, but this treatment is different from that one. In that film, we saw how cruel and arbitrary whites were to blacks in colonial Africa, particularly considering they were the outsiders. We saw how capricious and temporary their experience on the continent was. I

n this film, however, we see the opposite: We see how there is a small minority of whites who now consider themselves Africans, who have lived on and worked the land for generations and care for the well being of all the people who live there.

Set in a West African country in the present day, the film shows the experiences of Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), the oldest daughter of a family on a coffee plantation. There is a civil war burning its way through the jungle of the land and gangs of child soldiers are forcing the village people out. They are most interested in the Vial farm, because they see it as their land, the land of the natives, not the white post-colonialists. Maria resolves to not leave her land, which she sees as part of her blood, more than just an accident of birth and has to fend off the onslaught by the bloody soldiers.

This film is a beautiful Judith story, where Maria has to cut off the advancing army by decapitating the head. Denis brings this idea up early by closely associating Maria with the color red and showing decapitated livestock throughout her travels. This is an elegant and subtle touch and really a wonderful thing.

Sewn through the whole film is a wonderful tapestry of gorgeous shots of the countryside and land of Africa. These transitional shots help to convey emotion and lead us to better understand Maria's love and defense of her land. Sure it would be easier for her to leave, but she loves this place, the way she would love her mother, the way biblical people loved their tribes and their land, so she has to stay. (Credit should go to Yves Cape for the wonderful cinematography and brilliant use of color.)

This film is something that could easily be watched and enjoyed on a very basic visceral level, but could also then be dissected and enjoyed for all the meaning and symbolism inside it. I am fascinated at the idea that white people (who are actually represented as red here - with blood and Huppert's red hair) are more closely tied to the land than some of the black children. This could be a response to Chocolat, which always felt to me to be very much an ashamed portrait of French colonialism, saying that not all whites are the same in Africa.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

The King's Speech (Tuesday, December 7, 2010) (154)

The King's Speech is a movie about King George VI (Colin Firth) of England and how just before he became king and in the first years of his reign, after his brother Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, he had a terrible stammer that made it basically impossible to speak to anyone, and particularly in front of large crowds.

He and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) tried all sorts of speech therapists throughout England and have always struck out. It seems that there were a lot of quacks out there who had no problems with trying and failing to help a royal with ridiculous therapy techniques.

One day Elizabeth finds Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) an Aussie who has a very interesting psychoteraputic process to speech therapy (I think a lot of speech therapy these days is closer to this than it is to putting marbles in your mouth an enunciating or whatever). He begins treating the soon-to-be king with very unorthodox methods, like calling him his family name Bertie and asking him about his feelings of losing his father. All of their work leads up to a big speech he gives on the radio to all of his subjects around the world at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

This is not a bad movie, but it's not much of an interesting movie at all - basically nothing happens in it. It's about a guy with a stammer who goes from a communication level of about four out of ten to a level of about seven-ish out of ten. Big fucking deal! We never really get any insight into the King, either because the writer (David Seidler) and director (Tom Hooper) didn't think it was polite to investigate a royal in such a way or maybe because not much is known of his private life (for the same reason). I guess this is a buddy movie... but it's a really top-heavy one that much more about style than substance.

Hooper uses some nice super wide angle shots to convey a level of uncomfortable intimacy, putting us in the visceral position that George is in during his therapy. This is very clever, but is basically just a gimmick. It doesn't really connect to any particular psychological drama we're seeing (unlike, say Polanski's use of wide angle shots in Repulsion, which show Catherine Deneuve going mad). There is no psycho-drama here, which is really frustrating because we are teased with it for a moment and then it's taken away.

The script is pretty terrible here and might be the worst part of the film. Most of the dialogue is ridiculous. There's a scene that's in the trailer where Logue is sitting in some special coronation chair in Westminster Abbey and George starts yelling at him to move. Logue ask him why he should and he responds, "because I have a VOICE." Ugh. What a terrible line. And it's not really like that leads to any breakthrough, as we were already told than when he yells, he doesn't stammer. On top of this, there is a collapse of the time structure where we see in one scene George's coronation and in the next his big '39 speech. Those two events were about two years apart and there was a lot of travel and speech giving in the middle - what about those years? (Also, what about Goerge's phonemic 'r' sound that he can't say? Is that just OK for English people to not be able to say hard Rs? I was confused that that was never brought up.)

The acting is getting a lot of hype here, but I thought it was just very OK. Firth does a very good impression of a man with a stammer and Rush is not as big and over-the-top as he has been in some past roles. The acting is good, but it didn't move me very much.

This whole movie didn't move me. I don't know why exactly it was made. It's not all that special a story. We don't really see what happens that leads to his breakthrough (aside from the simple practice of saying specific words and sounds). It just sits there and doesn't move much. Big deal!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (a.k.a. HP7P1) (Sunday, December 5, 2010) (153)

So this is the continuation of the Harry Potter tale. It's the first part of a two-part final book... and it's very, very long. This is the seventh year of school for Harry and his friends - but the whole book takes place with the kids not in class. I guess when you're fighting the Most Powerful Wizard in History and trying to stop him from destroying the world, you get a hall pass or a doctor's note and are excused from school. Whatever.

Harry, Ron and Hermione are on the hunt for the remaining three (or four) horcruxes - objects in which Voldemort put part of his soul so he be sure to not die easily. They basically move around, mostly in the wilderness, though sometimes in weird small towns, trying to avoid Death Eaters (bad guys) and solve a few riddles (like the mysterious gifts left for each of them by Dumbledore in his will and what the next horcruxes are).

As with some of the previous films - but probably more so here- this doesn't totally work as a movie without a book and wiki easily at hand to explain some of the more obscure details or general sweeps of the story. This film mostly moves along on the steam of the books, rather than it's own internal engine. It's a bit difficult to follow at times and some things happen in rather magical ways, leaving us scratching our heads in bewilderment.

This movie has some very dull moments and overall plays much longer than its 150minute run-time. I think the idea here is to have the entire seventh book, so it was divided up into two gigantic halves. I think it would have been better to cut some of the less critical material and make the film more 120-minutes or so. It would have been better for figuring out the overall feel and keeping a nice, efficient story moving along. There is a lot of stuff here with kids sitting in the woods thinking about stuff and reading.

The overall look of the film is dark, gray and foggy. This is very nice and gives a great feeling to the tale. Just like the book was, this is not really a movie for little kids. It's a movie for teenagers and older people... it's spooky and rather frank about sex/love and death.

This is a good movie, though not a great one. The script should have been cut a bit, sacrificing perfect re-creation of the book for a more enjoyable, easier film viewing experience.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Black Swan (Saturday, December 4, 2010) (152)

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is not at all the film that I expected it to be (I guess that's why you go to the movies...). I was thinking it was a rivalry story of two young women, one on top and one as up-and-comer who are fighting for dominance. This is not really that at all.

The story revolves around Nina (Natalie Portman), a humorless young dancer in a New York City ballet company. She has been stuck in the middle or high middle of the troupe for a few years and is trying to catch her big break. She lives with her very over-protective mother... oh, and she's fucking nuts. She has hallucinations from very early on in the film, some are bloody, most are shocking. She ignores these visions and tries to continue on with her life.

As the new season is about to open the director of the company Thomas (pronounced "Tow-maaahhh", of course) (Vincent Cassel) announces that the show they will be doing is Swan Lake... but that he has some new ideas for it (or something). Nina main rival in the auditions is Lily (Mila Kunis) a hot new dancer who came to New York from San Francisco (how mysterious!).

Nina gets the role, but struggles with the emotions and sexuality that Thomas wants her to put into the role, because she is such an uptight drone. He shows her Lily dancing and says she should be more sexual like she is. Mostly from this point, we see Nina struggling with her slow decent into deep schizophrenia. She sees scary things jump out at her and speak to her, she sees herself growing wings or something, she sees herself having a lesbian tryst. She struggles sorta with a rivalry with Lily, but this is never really fully fleshed-out.

The film is basically about a girl going from pretty crazy and very tightly wound to more crazy and more tightly wound. There isn't a lot of development. She's never really warm or very interesting and never totally sane. This isn't really an interesting character development or plot. The dancing stuff is just the frame around the psycho-drama - it's not really about dancing at all. She could be a college student or a girl with a job on Wall Street. Mostly the dancing is just showy and an excuse to see Natalie in tight clothes (which is kinda gross when she so super skinny).

But this isn't really a psycho-drama in the sense of Bergman's Personal or Hour of the Wolf. This isn't about how she's going from sane to insane or how she's insane and doesn't know it, but we know it. This is about a girl who knows well that she's crazy and denies it. The only sorta inverse dramatic irony that Aronofsky gives us is that she knows she's crazy and we don't know until the third scene of the first act (and, by the way, that reveal is way too early). That's not interesting.

Why couldn't Nina have been a girl in the job of her dreams struggling physically with the work, but fighting to make it right who slowly goes crazy? I guess that would be more banal, but it would have worked better as an interesting narrative.

Aronofsky's aesthetic is totally lazy here. Everything is cold and dark (get it?!) and moving between lots of white and lots of black (get it?!). He also uses a shit-ton of mirrors to remind us of the duality of life and the split in Nina's psychology. It's so fucking heavy handed it's hard to watch. I would like this if it was a bit more Brechtian - and he was commenting on the dullness and heavy-handedness of the style. Instead we get nothing but earnest triteness. (N.B. This is not an arch attempt at farce or sarcasm, the way Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls or Starship Troopers were. There is no evidence to suggest Aronofsky is anything but totally serious about what he's presenting to us. If there's a wink in there, it's invisible. If this is a joke, it failed miserably.)

There is also a lot of waste, excess and fat in the script and some really horrible dialogue. One of the sub-stories here is that there is an older dancer, Beth (Winona Ryder), who is near the end of her career and struggling with addiction, depression and the loss of her physical talents. She tries to commit suicide (off-screen, so we don't really give a shit) and ends up in the hospital. There's a thing where Nina is so in love with her dancing, that she steals small things from her (a lipstick, a pack of cigarettes). I think this is supposed to mean something deep, but it just comes off as silly waste. This thread is never developed much and doesn't really connect to Nina's own psychology (she might be schizto, but she's also a lover of art! Who cares?!).

Considering the film is from Nina's point of view, and it is well established that her view is sick and not true, most of what we see onscreen is questionable and hard -to-believe. We cannot say that anything really happens or anyone really exists. I have strong feelings that the whole Lily character is just a figment of Nina's psychosis and doesn't exist. We only see her when Lily sees her and she seems to be a total psycho foil for her. She also, curiously, doesn't have a last name, when all other characters do. This is sorta interesting, but not really. It doesn't add anything to the story, but is just a flashy tidbit.

What Aronofsky lacks in intrigue, he makes up for in cheap surprises and gags. If a character turns around, odds are there's someone spooky lurking behind her. BOO! This is not filmmaking. This is simple and works the same when your 6-years old as when your and adult. This doesn't make me feel any different about Nina or her situation.

I should say that the Black Swan dance sequence at the end of the film is actually remarkably well done, very cinematic and beautiful. Well done on that part, Darren.

I think this story was simply badly conceived. I think it is a piece that could conceivably look nice (although I wasn't moved by the look), but the story and script were messy and it never was able to get over that. The acting is very OK (Cassel is terrible, Kunis is forgettable for the 20 minutes she's onscreen, Portman didn't have much to work with). This is a bad movie.

Stars: .5 of 4

Fair Game (Friday, December 3, 2010) (151)

Imagine, if you will, that you were raped in the most brutal and violent way possible. Now imagine you were forced to watch a feature film of your own rape. Finally imagine that as a cherry on top of this horrible sundae, you were forced to watch another person being horribly raped, although you really didn't totally care about them. This whole viewing experience might be rather nauseating and terrible for you. This is the best analogy of my experience watching Doug Liman's Fair Game.

OK, I know the rape metaphor sounds extreme, but what else would you call Bush's horrible, horrible war in Iraq based on political motive and not any sort of military goal. Fair Game is essentially as much a film about how the Bush administration moved to a war footing from their first day in office and then sold the war with bullshit as it is about a career-C.I.A. operative being exposed by a Bob Novak column (leading to the deaths of several people at a minimum) for political retribution. This film was downright hard to sit through for me, partly because it's just not very interesting or gripping and partly because the story underlying the narrative is so incredibly foul (and, of course, true).

Based on the books by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson, the film tells the story of what happened to lead to their entire lives being turned upside down as political pawns. We see Valerie organizing what seem to be high-level research and negotiations on counter-proliferation matters in the late 1990s, going undercover with assumed identities, all while working for the C.I.A. We see Joe, a former diplomat in the State Department, being sent to Niger to investigate the claims of a deal with Iraq for yellow cake uranium. We see how the war begins in Iraq, and that Joe decides to write an op-ed in the New York Times about how the claim of the uranium deal was based on bad intel. Then we see how the Bush White House leaks Valerie's name as pay-back.

There's something about films dealing with recent, painful events (mostly told from a liberal or ultra-liberal points of view) that I think are inherently frustrating and uninspired. Like a work about September 11, 2001, a film about the trail of lies that led to our involvement in the Iraq War stands as a rather hollow monolith devoid of much interest or emotional hooks. Clearly I have very strong emotions about what happened. (I fucking hate Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and all those motherfuckers with every bone in my body. I knew they were lying the whole time they were talking and I find their lack of concern for what they've fucked up beyond infuriating.)

How is Doug Liman (who really is a very mediocre filmmaker) going to tell me a story that adds something new to my experience? My emotions on the subject are so powerful that the film simply becomes a catalyst for my own rage; Liman can get away with emotional shorthand to trigger me having an extreme emotional reaction. This is very different, of course, from a filmmaker who has to tell an entire story from scratch and make me feel emotions simply from what he puts onscreen. Once he sets off my emotions, based on nothing he is doing cinematically, they cloud my ability to watch the story with any sort of unbiased view. The experience for me becomes about my rage and not about what I'm seeing, which really becomes secondary.

But there are a lot of other problems with the film. For one, the style is totally banal and so recycled it's just plain boring. Liman uses lots of hand-held cameras to make it seem like a documentary, make it seem intimate. But then nearly every transition occurs with the most hackneyed helicopter shots over D.C., showing monuments and the Capitol Building then such shots are totally unnecessary. (He also bizarrely suggests the Wilsons take cabs all the time - including Valerie taking a cab when she finally goes to talk to Congress. This makes no sense. Why would people who are somewhat afraid for their safety take cabs. Nobody in D.C. takes cabs.)

Beyond these issues, however, there is a lot of problems with the characters that are presented. Joe Wilson, who gives his resume to us at least twice, is a life-long diplomat and foreign service worker, yet somehow he's totally unaware of how the C.I.A. gathers intel and how governmental bureaucracy is sometimes frustrating. (Are you telling me, a former deputy to several embassies in West Africa and the former ambassador to Gabon never worked with the C.I.A? Hard to believe.) We only ever get the most superficial portrait of Joe and Valerie and never really connect to them at all. Mostly we see that they are both heroically fighting to knock down lies that they are asked to support. This isn't a connection to then, however, this is an observation.

I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but Joe Wilson comes off here as a reckless narcissist. We constantly see Valerie telling him to shut up and not stir the pot about what he knows about Saddam (having met him over the years) and yellow cake, but he constantly doesn't listen to her. I feel like Liman is showing this almost as a joke (she tells him to not go on television the next day and then there's a cut to him doing exactly that), but it's not really funny. In the strangest turn of events, we see that a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists, who Valerie had worked with in the lead-up to the invasion and who she was trying to get out of the country, are murdered as a result of the whole Bob Novak column. Novak is absolutely not in this film to such a great degree that it's really presented that the blood of the scientists falls on Joe's hands. Is that what Liman meant to do?

Also strangely absent from this whole story are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; all we see are Scooter Libby and Karl Rove discussing what to do about the Wilsons. Is Liman suggesting that somehow this was organized by Bush's and Cheney's head men, but not by them specifically? Is he absolving the two of them of responsibility? It's very hard to tell.

I should mention something about the acting, which is getting lots of attention, but which I found totally unimpressive. Penn is unemotional, mechanical and rather overdone; Naomi Watts (as Valerie) is fine, but she's so monotone and her style is so vanilla it's hard for me ever to like her very much. The best acting job is Sam Shepard (playing Valerie's dad... he always plays dads these days), who gives a beautiful one-scene performance.

The most exciting moment for me in this film was when I realized a scene where Joe and Valerie are talking in a park was actually shot in my neighborhood park a block from my home in Brooklyn. The rest was either incredibly dull and badly formed or so dramatically uncomfortable as it showed infuriating material that I already know well. This is not much of a movie, it's just a regurgitation of a somewhat interesting, somewhat uninteresting story.

Stars: 1 of 4